Abstract
Information extracted from social media has proven to be very useful in the domain of emergency management. An important task in emergency management is rapid crisis mapping, which aims to produce timely and reliable maps of affected areas. During an emergency, the volume of emergency-related posts is typically large, but only a small fraction is relevant and help rapid mapping effectively. Furthermore, posts are not useful for mapping purposes unless they are correctly geolocated and, on average, less than 2% of posts are natively georeferenced. This paper presents an algorithm, called CIME, that aims to identify and geolocate emergency-related posts that are relevant for mapping purposes. While native geocoordinates are most often missing, many posts contain geographical references in their metadata, such as texts or links that can be used by CIME to filter and geolocate information. In addition, social media creates a social network and each post can be enhanced with indirect information from the post’s network of relationships with other posts (for example, a retweet can be associated with other geographical references which are useful to geolocate the original tweet). To exploit all this information, CIME uses the concept of context, defined as the information characterizing a post both directly (the post’s metadata) and indirectly (the post’s network of relationships). The algorithm was evaluated on a recent major emergency event demonstrating better performance with respect to the state of the art in terms of total number of geolocated posts, geolocation accuracy and relevance for rapid mapping.
Highlights
Social media play an important role in emergency management
CIME is tested on two case studies. – We evaluate CIME from the point of view of supporting the needs arising from leveraging social media analysis for rapid mapping activities
Given that social media content is timely, as it is available in the first few hours after an emergency situation, it can represent an enabler for the faster delivery of maps of the affected areas in the first 24 hours after the event, when data from satellite and other official sources are not yet available
Summary
Social media play an important role in emergency management. Information extracted from social media has proven to be very informative in crisis situations [1, 2]. An important activity in this context is rapid crisis mapping. The production of maps needs to be rapid, that is, fast enough to support emergency management as soon as the emergency begins, during the so-called response phase. In this phase, issues such as the delineation of the perimeter of the emergency or the severity of the event are explored in a rush of turbulent aid-organization processes. Available maps represent an invaluable input for these life-saving activities
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